From time to time, I've written on this site about the
problematic DiversityImbalance in the software
development profession, and how we need to take deliberate action to
increase the proportion of underrepresented groups. This is all well
and good, but naturally leads to the questions of what
underrepresented groups we should be concerned about. In
ThoughtWorks we've been using the term
"historically-discriminated-against" [1] to
help focus our thinking for one of the main drivers for embracing
diversity. [2]

Humanity has a consistently sad record of pushing groups of
humans down. Historically-discriminated-against groups include women
pretty much everywhere, African-American and Native-Americans in the
United States, lower castes in India, aboriginals in Australia,
homosexuals everywhere… sadly the list is long.

Historically-discriminated-against groups are often minorities,
but not always. Blacks in South Africa have always been a
considerable majority, but are historically-discriminated-against.
Often historically-discriminated-against people are visibly
different, based on race or gender. But they can equally well not be
as visible, such as religious groups or homosexuals.

The historic discrimination is the essence of why we should work
to support fixing problems. One might argue that the
under-representation of men in nursing is as problematic a diversity
imbalance as that of women in tech. While I don't see a lack of male
nurses as a good thing, I think it's less of a concern because
men have not suffered the historic discrimination that women have.
Similarly if someone discovered that green-eyed people were
disproportionately rare in the software industry, again my concern
would be less because of the lack of historic discrimination.
(Although I would still find such a disproportion intriguing.)

There's an important point about the "historical" in this
definition. Many historically-discriminated-against groups have
legal and social protections from discrimination these days. In
America it's now socially unacceptable to make public racist or sexist
comments, and illegal to carry out most forms of racist or sexist
discrimination. But you can't cure centuries of historic wrongs in
just a few years. This is the fallacy of people who advocate for
gender-blind and race-blind policies. It takes many generations to
undo the effect of centuries of discrimination, so just because the
law and society are beginning to catch up doesn't mean the work of
supporting historically-discriminated-against groups can stop.

So when we see only 27%
of software developers are women in world of 50% women, the fact
that women are historically-discriminated-against is evidence that
the effects of their historical oppression haven't yet been
corrected. While some may argue that there's a biological
explanation for the lack of women programmers, I consider that to be
a treacherous argument. There's no evidence to support that women
are less capable programmers (other than the circular one of their
lack of numbers). Worse still, such biological and cultural
arguments have a long history of being used to justify
discrimination. So unless credible evidence appears, I think it's
wise to consider that an underrepresentation of a
historically-discriminated-against group is a sign that we haven't
yet finished the task of correcting a long-running wrong. And until
we do, our vision of a meritocratic profession will be undermined by
the reality of the imbalance and its attendent AlienatingAtmosphere

Notes

1:
The precise term was coined by Bill Kimmel inspired by one of
our values statements of Social Responsibility: "We strive to
redress historic discrimination, including that of race, gender
and sexual orientation.". Similar phrases appear in various
parts of the world, but this is the origin of our usage.

2:
There are many aspects to diversity, which is why "diversity" is
such a tricky word to work with. I often see articles extolling
the benefits of diverse teams, where this diversity is looking
for diversity of thought. This is valuable but different from a
focus on the historically-discriminated-against. Fortunately
these various aspects of diversity usually go together.

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